


Les Masques

by DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 22:34:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19029313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered/pseuds/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered
Summary: Alex is an artist in post WW2 Paris. She makes masks for French soldiers who were disfigured in the war. Astra is a German soldier in need of her services. This could easily have been longer but I already have enough long WIPs.  :)





	Les Masques

Three rows of incomplete faces stared at Alexandrie D’Anvers. Some were nothing more than a jawline, or a cheekbone and half of a nose. One was the entire left side of a face, with one very real-looking glass eye gazing out at her, rimmed with eyelashes and eyebrow made of real hair. Some were still in their raw copper state, and some had flesh toned paint that was still drying. 

They sat in neat rows on shelves that lined a small part of the smoke-yellowed plaster walls of a vast, high-cielinged  loft studio full of magnificent sculptures in the classical Greek style; portraits of Victory, Liberty, Resistance. The arched windows looked out onto the teeming cobblestone blocks of the 19th Arrondissement, or what remained of it.

Artists weren’t much good in a war, but as Alexandrie was proving, they were quite necessary in the aftermath. 

“I’m glad to find you in your studio, Mademoiselle D’Anvers,” came a wearyingly familiar voice. 

Alexandrie turned around to find a dark-coated man coming out of the stairs into the loft. She greeted him politely. “Where else would I be, Monsieur le Secretaire, when you keep me so busy?” He was probably the same age as her, nearly thirty, and too young to be Secretary of anything. Someone’s nephew, she expected.

The young Secretary of Culture surveyed the rows of masks in their various stages of incompletion, unconsciously fiddling at the corners of his pencil-thin moustache. “I hope you don’t mind.” 

The French government, such as it was, was paying the bills for these masks of hers. And so, while the heads of Vichy traitors rolled in the streets, Alexandrie was rebuilding the faces of French soldiers who had been disfigured in the war. This particular low-level secretary of the new government was referring people to her studio. In truth, she had more than she could handle and would probably need an assistant soon. 

“Of course not,” she answered, and lit a cigarette. She noticed a woman, lingering behind him, her face wrapped in bandages to the point of nearly being completely covered. “Who is this?” 

“The reason for my visit,” the Secretary said. “She is need of your excellent skills, I’m afraid.” 

Alexandrie took a pull from her cigarette and let the smoke curl into the air in front of her. Two intense, blue-green eyes gazed out at her from the mass of bandages. “What’s your name?” 

The Secretary interjected swiftly. “Her name is Astra Inze.” 

Alexandrie’s eyebrows shot up.  She looked for a moment at the woman, who was standing with impeccable posture in the entrance alcove. “One moment,” she said to the woman.  “Monsieur le Secretaire, a word please?” 

She led him to the other side of the spacious studio and stepped behind a paper screen.  “A German?” she demanded in hushed tones. “Why is the government asking me to fix a German?” 

The Secretary smiled patiently. “She was a high-level German spy who turned against Germany and assisted the Resistance, at some great cost to herself, as you can see. Surely you’re not going to be difficult about this?” 

Alexandrie pouted for a moment. Modern Art was all the rage in Europe, and her beautiful Greek classical style sculptures tended to sell slowly, when they sold at all. This business of making masks and facial prosthetics had made her the most prosperous she’d been in quite some time. She lived comfortably and ate well and worked at her preferred trade while most of her friends knocked around in three or four different jobs. She wasn’t about to rock the boat. “Of course not. I wanted an explanation. Now I have one.” 

She set a time with the German to come by the following day in order to begin the consultation process.

  
  
  


********

  
  


“Is this as good as you could get in Côte d’Ivoire?” 

Her friend Jean sat across the small table, where they drank wine and ate from the savory dish of mafé that his sister had made. This evening’s variation was chicken in peanut sauce. “No. She can’t get half the spices here.” 

Jean had been a friend of her father’s, had fought in the Resistance with him, and was the one to bring his body home to her in a pine box loaded into the back of a milk truck. He’d felt obliged to look after her ever since. 

“Well, it’s delicious. Thank her for me.” 

“I always do. Even when you forget to ask me to.” He winked. “So you’re going to fix this German, then, eh, Lexie?”

She nodded. “What can I do? I have no love for the Germans, but I can hardly say no and risk losing the government’s business.” 

He raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure? It seems there aren’t many doing such detailed realism. Your Victory practically looks as if she’ll jump off the pedestal right there. No-one else does what you do.” 

She cast a fond eye at her Victory statue. “Yes, well. Europe is in the grip of madness. They have decided that beauty is not beautiful anymore. And I like to eat.” 

Jean eyed the empty dish between them. “Yes, I can see that.” 

She laughed. Her mood temporarily improved.   
  
  


*****

  
  


The German came the next day, wearing black trousers and a French army jacket, her face swathed in cotton as it had been the day before.  A dark brown ponytail peeked out the back and ran down between her shoulder blades. 

Alexandrie brought her over to a large leather chair, similar to ones that were used in barber shops. Normally when soldiers came to her, she spent several minutes chatting with them, trying to get them comfortable, before asking them to take off their bandages.  She’d ask them about their mothers, their sweethearts, their dogs. She’d tell them a funny anecdote or two. Today, she was all business. She sat down on a wooden stool in front of the German. “Alright, so. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.” 

The German’s eyes widened with a little fear, or perhaps just surprise. “Just like that?” Her speech was a little muffled. It could be the bandages, or it could be damage to the mouth.

Alexandrie sighed, but softened her tone a little. “Whatever is missing or damaged underneath these bandages, I promise you that I’ve seen just as bad if not worse. You won’t scare me.” 

The German still hesitated, sitting perfectly erect in the chair, staring at her with the whites of her eyes quite visible. 

Alexandrie stood up, walked around behind the chair and began to tug off the little metal fasteners along the places where the bandages held together. 

“Wait,” the German said, and reached up, placing her hands over Alexandrie’s. “I’ll do it. Please.” 

There was such desperation in her voice, Alexandrie stopped, slowly removed her hands from beneath the German’s sweaty ones, and then patted her on the shoulder. “Alright. I’m sorry. Take your time.” 

There would be no getting out of this quickly. 

“It isn’t that I’m afraid of scaring you,” the woman said after a moment of sitting frozen in the chair. “I hide because I feel like I’m not myself. I don’t want anyone to see me like this.” 

“Did Monsieur le Secretaire show you what I’ve done for the other soldiers?” 

She shook her head. 

“Alright. Hold on.” Alexandrie walked to a work bench on the other side of the loft, where a stack of black and white photos sat. She walked back over, pulled her stool up next to the German’s chair and showed her. The first one was a soldier whose entire jaw was gone. She showed the photo of him wearing the jaw she had built for him. He looked like an entirely different man.

The German gasped. “You can hardly even see the seam where the mask begins!”

“That’s right,” Alexandrie answered proudly. “Because I’m the best at this. I match the paint of the mask exactly to your skin.” She flipped through a few more before and after photographs. “Do you see? No-one does this, and if they did, they wouldn’t be as good as I am.”

“Yes,” the German murmured in amazement. 

“But I can’t do this for you if you don’t show me what I’m working with.” 

The German hesitated for another moment. Those blue-green eyes stared at her, glassy. Then suddenly, she asked, “What’s my name?” 

Alexandrie froze. In truth, she had not retained it when the young Secretary had introduced them. “What’s mine?” she shot back. 

The eyes blinked. “The Artist,” the woman admitted, clearly ashamed that she had not remembered. 

Alexandrie’s mouth twitched with amusement. “That’s alright. Your name is The German.” 

They both chuckled silently for a moment.  “Astra,” the German said finally, and offered her hand. 

“Alexandrie.” She clasped the German’s hand. 

“That is a beautiful name. Do your friends call you Lexie?” Her French was very good, her accent recognizably German but faint. 

“Yes.” 

“May I?” 

“No.” She looked at Astra. “What was your rank before you came over to our side?” 

“Oberst.” A colonel, then.

“Then I will call you Oberst. And you may call me Mademoiselle.”  She stared at the eyes that peered out from the bandages. “Now, Oberst, do you have any photographs of your face before you were injured?” 

The colonel nodded and took a small photograph from her pocket and showed it. It was two women who looked identical, and a little blonde girl. The two women both had the same intense eyes. “You’re a twin?” 

“Yes.” 

“The little girl? Is she your daughter?” 

“My niece. I couldn’t have a child even if I wanted to.” 

She had been a beauty, this Astra. She’d had a face like one of Alexandrie’s Greek figures; Love, perhaps, or Truth. Cheekbones that looked like carved marble and a jawline that would cut glass.

But still. She was a German. She had likely spilled French blood. Her sister probably did too, and her pretty little niece would probably have done the same had she been old enough. “Are you the one with the white streak or without?” 

“With.” 

The warmth in those eyes in the photograph, the affection. Alexandrie sighed. Anyone was capable of love, including Germans. “I can make you look like this again. Will you show me the damage?” 

As if she were unraveling a terrible secret, Astra slowly reached up and began to liberate her damaged face, a layer of cotton at a time. 

It could have been worse.  The eyes were intact. As the bandages unwound, Alexandrie could see that the right cheekbone was where her troubles began.  It was shattered, collapsed inward, a pit filled with criss-crossing, overlapping folds of scar tissue. The cheek itself was also concave and looked as though it had healed after some very poor stitching. Alexandrie had seen this before. A good bit of the tissue had been blown off and so they’d done their best to seal it up. The mouth, however, was more or less intact except some damage and scarring around the right corner. Lucky.  She had pretty lips. 

Astra’s eyes remained closed, as if she didn’t want to chance seeing her reflection somewhere.   

The worst of it seemed to be the nose, or what used to be a nose. Now it was mainly a knot of shiny scar tissue flattened against her face. Alexandrie’s chest tightened involuntarily, as it always did when she looked at these terrible injuries and contemplated what pain must have come with them.

Astra sat, reams of gauze in hand, not looking up at her.

Alexandrie hated Germans, but she loved a challenge. 

“I can work with that,” she said briskly. “Does it hurt to be touched anywhere on your injuries?”

“No. I feel very little on those areas of my face.”

Alexandrie nodded once. “Then next, we take a plaster casting of your face.” 

Still staring at the bandages in her lap, Astra chewed at her lower lip. “Why?” 

“I can’t build a house if I don’t have the foundation. It only takes an hour.” 

But Astra was winding the bandages back around her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I am grateful for your efforts, but I have had enough for today. Can I come back tomorrow?”

There was little choice but to say yes. 

  
  


****

  
  


Astra sat in the chair, unbandaged, eyes closed, while Alexandrie mixed the alginate. Several strips of plaster sat in a small pile of white dust beside a small bowl of water on the wooden work surface in front of the chair. In black trousers and a turtleneck, hair held off of her face with a small red scarf, she stirred with a wooden spoon until the mixture became thick.  

“If you care about that shirt,” she said to Astra, “I would take it off.” 

Astra shifted in the chair. “Then… how would I…?” 

“I can give you a smock.” 

She marched over to where an extra painter’s smock lay in a heap at the end of the work bench, and then thrust it at Astra. She took an extra few minutes to stir the alginate with a wooden spoon, and watched out of the corner of her eye while Astra struggled out of the dark grey work shirt and then pulled the smock on.  “So, how were you injured?” 

“Bomb in Blockhaus d'Éperlecques,” she answered tersely. 

“But I thought it was never used for storing German bombs.” 

“That’s right. Because I gave Allied forces information about their plans and they bombed it to keep them from being able to use it for that.” 

Alexandrie snorted. “So the Germans were trying to make a bomb depot, so you helped us drop bombs on them, and you got bombed instead.” 

“Not instead, just in addition. I’m sure there’s an irony in there somewhere.”

Alexandrie smirked. She came over and adjusted the smock around Astra’s shoulders. They were broad and muscular. She hadn’t noticed on their previous meetings because she had always been concealed under jackets. She also had not noticed the wooden prosthetic hand on her left side. “What does it take, I wonder, for a German to turn traitor on her own people?” she mused aloud, picking up the bowl of alginate and a thick, flat brush. 

“It takes seeing your people commit worse horrors than you could possibly imagine.” 

Alexandrie gestured to the wall of incomplete faces. “I can imagine quite a lot.”  She set the bowl down, and then pulled the cloth tie from Astra’s hair. Aggressively, she raked her fingers through the loose hair, pulling it back, then smoothing it. Couldn’t have stray hairs getting into the adhesive or the plaster. “My father came home in a box, thanks to the Germans.” She paused, smoothed the hair with one hand, noting the white streak in it, and then re-tied it tightly. “And those faces on the wall all needed to be made, thanks to the Germans.” 

Her voice was cold as she said it. 

Astra was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry for your father.” 

“Are you ashamed to be German?” Alexandrie demanded. 

“I’m ashamed that my people got drunk on pride and conquest.” 

“Is that it, then?” 

__ “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest  
__ To children ardent for some desperate glory,  
_ The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est  
_ __ Pro patria mori.”

Alexandrie picked up her steel bowl full of alginate. “What is that?” 

“A German war poem. ‘It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.’” She shook her head. “Sometimes I wish I had.” 

Alexandrie frowned. “No more talking,” she said, but it sounded less firm coming out of her mouth than it had in her head. And then she began to brush the mixture onto Astra’s face, being careful to avoid bubbling, to fill every little well and hollow, especially in those places where the knotted scars made this challenging. 

“You do not wish that you had died,” she scolded as she worked. “I will make you beautiful again, and then you’ll see how glad you are to be alive.” 

Astra didn’t answer, because she couldn’t. As Alexandrie finished the last strokes of alginate around the damaged right jawline, she added, “You’ll be even prettier than your sister.” 

She began taking the plaster strips, dunking them in the bowl of water, squeezing them out, and then laying them over the contours of Astra’s damaged face. She was quick at this. She had done so many of these over the last few months. She knew exactly how much time she had before the alginate dried, exactly how slow to be in order to be precise, and exactly how quick to be in order to avoid trying to set plaster against alginate that had congealed. 

“I know my craft,” she went on, anxious to fill the silence. “Just as you knew yours.” She paused. “You knew yours well, I take it?” 

Astra bobbed her head to indicate a yes. 

“So, it was about the Jews, then? Is that why you quit?” 

A pause, and then Astra bobbed her head again. Alexandrie continued laying the plaster strips against her face. 

“Yes, I’d heard about that. They were doing terrible things, weren’t they.” 

Astra again bobbed her head. 

“So the conquest wasn’t really enough,” Alexandrie went on, applying the plaster. “It needed to be genocide before you abandoned your Fatherland.” 

Astra trembled in the chair, saying nothing. Alexandrie supposed it was a bit unfair of her to challenge the oberst this way when she couldn’t respond. 

“Then again, we had a conqueror too, once. A while back. Napoleon. Maybe you’ve heard of him?” 

Astra sat shaking for a few moments more, then bobbed her head. 

After laying a few more plaster strips on Astra’s face, Alexandrie looked at the woman in the chair. She had probably taken French lives, but she had also saved how many by her sacrifice at Blockhaus d'Éperlecques? Who could even know? 

“So, you like poetry, do you, Oberst?” 

Astra nodded. 

“Alright. We have an hour to wait while your face dries. Hold still, please.” 

She found, in a dusty corner of the room, a book Jean had left there months ago, hoping she would read it. She had been so busy she hadn’t gotten to it. It was a collected works of Rainer Maria Rilke. She came and sat on a wooden stool beside the soldier woman, flipped it open, and read:   
  


_ “I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough _

_ to truly consecrate the hour. _

_ I am much too small in this world, yet not small enough _

_ to be to you just object and thing,  _

_ dark and smart…” _

  
  


*****

  
  


“So,” Jean remarked, glancing at the book on the workbench. “You finally got around to reading that Rilke I left you.” 

Alexandrie nodded. “Yes. It takes a long time for the plaster to dry and it was too annoying to have the silence between the German and me, so I read it aloud.” 

Jean gave her an enigmatic smile. “Does she like poetry?” 

“Yes.” 

He picked up the photograph of Astra and her sister and niece. “Which one is her?” 

“The one with the streak.” 

He was impressed. “She was beautiful. She looked like one of your statues, Lexie.” 

“I know,” she answered irritably. “And by all accounts, her physique is roughly on par with Victory’s, too.” 

Jean didn’t comment.  He walked to her small icebox in the alcove at the end of the studio where she did her “living”. Opening it, he announced, “You are out of everything, and I know it isn’t because you have no money. You need an assistant.” 

She sighed heavily and lit a cigarette. “Yes, but it means having to pay them.” 

“So?”

“So, I don’t want to. Besides, you keep coming over with Patrice’s cooking.” 

Jean laughed and closed the icebox. “But you’re not doing any of your own sculpture anymore. Doesn’t it bother you?” 

She picked up a sheaf of sketch papers with pencil drawings, from several different angles, of a female figure. Like all of her work, it was in a moment of motion, the figure seeming to leap forward, one arm reaching out, as if trying to catch something tumbling off the edge of a high wall. “Well, I’m still drawing up plans, at least.” 

Jean looked at the papers. “What do you call her?” 

“I don’t know yet.” 

He inspected the paper for a moment longer. “Perhaps you should call her Courage.” 

  
  


******

 

Alexandrie spent some time sketching a few other soldiers’ masks before returning to the task of Astra’s a few days later. The process, after she was satisfied with her sketches, would involve sculpting the new features on top of the existing plaster cast. Her pencil scratched across the large, thin sheets of sketch paper, as she drew the front view, the right hand view, the view from just below the chin, looking upwards. She spent a long time duplicating the intensity of the eyes. 

If Alexandrie understood one thing, she understood pain. 

When Astra came again, she had bandaged herself less completely; instead of the giant ball of gauze that she’d been the first time, she had wrapped the middle of her head only. So the nose was covered, and the shattered cheek, but the lightly damaged mouth and jaw was visible. She had bothered to style her hair. 

Astra stared at the sketches for several minutes without saying anything. 

“Well?” Alexandrie demanded. “Is it you?” 

“Yes. It’s me.” 

“Good. Then I can start sculpting.” She stood up with an air of indicating that they were finished, for the moment. 

But Astra seemed not to take this sign, lingering in front of her.  “It wasn’t only Jews, you know.” 

“What?” 

“It wasn’t only Jews. It was gypsies, too. And… and…” She floundered. “I don’t know the French word.  _ Schwul? _ ” 

“Homosexuals,” Alexandrie supplied. 

Astra nodded. “Yes. I didn’t want my niece to look at me as someone who tore children from their mothers’ arms and murdered lovers in their beds. I didn’t want her to learn that that was right.”  

“When did you come to the Allies?” 

“1941. Long before it was clear that they would win. But much later than I wish I had.”  She lifted her chin, looking Alexandrie in the eye. “It may be easy for you to judge me for it, but you cannot imagine how the horrifying becomes normal, how they do it so quickly, and how easy it is to carry out your orders unquestioningly, only because your little part of it is so small, and how you can tell yourself that you had nothing to do with it.” 

“Just doing your job?” Alexandrie asked, more weary than sardonic.

“Exactly.” Her eyes welled up. “I deserved to die in that bombing. I was never supposed to come out alive. I was supposed to atone for my part in the horrors.” 

The damage was inside and out. Alexandrie understood that, too. She placed a hand over Astra’s prosthetic one. “That is what you’re doing now.” 

Astra glanced anxiously down at their hands and then back up, shaking her head. 

“Isn’t it? You’re paying for your sins, no?” 

Astra looked away, but Alexandrie saw a few tears roll down into the thick band of gauze around the middle of her head. “I don’t deserve your gifts,” Astra whispered. 

“Maybe not. So? Become the person who deserves them. I think you have the heart to do so.” 

Astra’s brow creased, and her shoulders shook. Clenching her jaw, she drew back her prosthetic hand and blinked her tears back. “I thank you for your time, Mademoiselle.”  She hurried from the studio before Alexandrie could say more. 

  
  


********

  
  


Alexandrie sat at her small table, drinking a coffee she’d bought from the Arab-owned cafe downstairs. It was cold. She didn’t care. She had a burning cigarette champed between her teeth with a tower of ash that was threatening to topple off on its own accord, and was gripping her pencil, re-working the pose of the figure she’d shown Jean the other day. She didn’t even hear him enter till he was halfway across the space. 

“Busy?”

“You could use the doorbell, you know.” 

“When do I ever?” 

She shrugged, not looking up. 

He drew nearer. “Her again, eh?” 

“Not again. Still. It’s not quite right. And I have to settle on the face. Nothing I do is working.”  She didn’t mean to be cross with him, but he was there. 

He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a piece of paper. “I found this sticking out of the slot of your mailbox downstairs.” It was folded neatly in thirds and had “Mademoiselle” written on the back of it in painfully neat handwriting. 

Alexandrie frowned and took it. She unfolded it and read it:

__ “How can I keep my soul in me, so that  
__ it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise  
__ it high enough, past you, to other things?  
__ I would like to shelter it, among remote  
__ lost objects, in some dark and silent place  
__ that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.  


__ Yet everything that touches us, me and you,  
__ takes us together like a violin's bow,  
__ which draws one voice out of two separate strings.  
__ Upon what instrument are we two spanned?  
_ And what musician holds us in his hand?  
_ __ Oh sweetest song.”

And it was signed. – _ Oberst. _

Jean, prying as usual, leaned over her shoulder. “The German is sending you poetry now?” 

“Yes. Astra seemed to enjoy the Rilke I was reading the other day.” Alexandrie stared at the page for a moment longer. 

“Oh, it’s Astra now, is it?” Jean chuckled. “Well she has good taste in poetry, at least. I don’t mean to pry, Lexie, but maybe you’re her type, hm?” 

She snorted. “Please. Of course you mean to pry. It’s not that. This process is always very emotional for the wounded soldiers, and for me as well. That’s all.” 

But Jean was amusing himself now. “Yes, and what sort of emotion do you suppose that piece of paper conveys?” 

She wasn’t having it. She crumpled it up and tossed it aside. “Jean, are you here for a reason?” 

He deposited a paper bag with a loaf of bread onto her small table. “There’s a little cheese in there, since I’m betting you still haven’t gone shopping and if I let you starve to death Patrice will lock me out of the house. But please, hire an assistant, you bullheaded girl.” He smiled at her fondly. 

She sighed. “Fine, fine.” She ashed into her cold coffee. It was mainly to get the slight wincing reaction from Jean. 

“Waste of good coffee,” he grumbled. 

“Yes, yes. Out of my studio, or you’ll be my next statue, and I’ll name it Nagging.” 

He chuckled. She got up and embraced him.

After he left, she found the paper, uncrumpled it, and smoothed the crease marks over. 

“Upon what instrument,” she muttered, “are we two spanned?” 

  
  
  


****

  
  


The next week flew by. Alexandrie had three new consultations, delivered two finished masks, and finally cleared the space to sculpt Astra’s mask according to her sketches. Twice more, Astra left her poems, stuck in the mailbox. The first one, she didn’t respond to, but after the second, she left a note with “Oberst” written on the outside, and inside, it said, “Thank you for the poems. Please come Thursday and I will show you your new face.” 

When Astra arrived, Alexandrie sat her in the chair and showed her the sculpted mask. It would fit closely against her head, covering her shattered cheek, damaged jaw, and the light scars around the corner of her mouth. It would be affixed to her head with a pair of false spectacles. “Now you’ll really look like a poet,” she teased gently. 

Astra turned it over in her hands, saying nothing. 

“Let’s put it on you,” Alexandrie said, and carefully placed it against her face, adjusting the wire spectacles so that the mask sat flush against her face. 

The thin copper of the mask had a layer of white undercoating painted on it. It was so accurately sculpted, it looked as if part of Astra’s natural face had been painted white. She had strong cheekbones again, a flawless jawline, a straight, perfect nose. Alexandrie handed her a mirror. Astra’s lip quivered as she looked at the reflection that stared back at her. 

“Mademoiselle,” she whispered. “I cannot believe…” 

“Ah! No no no, do not thank me yet! We’re not done. We need to paint it.”  Alexandrie paused. “And once again, if you care about that shirt, I would take it off.” 

Astra stood, deftly unbuttoning the buttons of the dark work shirt with one hand. Alexandrie came and assisted her with the last two, then moved behind her and slid it down off her shoulders, neatly folded it, and laid it aside. She looked at Astra, standing shirtless in her dark trousers, and took a moment to appreciate how she was built - lean and muscular, but still feminine. Strong shoulders, broad ribcage, narrow waist. The skin was marked with pale, shiny shrapnel scars, bullet wounds, and a long, crazy slash mark down that she could not bring herself to ask about. She hadn’t seen any of it the last time.

Astra, still wearing the white mask, looked warily at her. “Why do you look at me that way?” she whispered. 

Alexandrie shrugged. “I’m sorry. You’re beautiful, that’s all.” 

Astra flushed. “No.” 

“Yes.”  She tore her eyes away and found the smock, and wrapped it around Astra’s shoulders. “Please, Oberst, sit down.” 

Astra sat. 

Alexandrie pulled her paints out and began to mix a skin tone; a little pink, a little more brown, a little yellow, a little more white. Astra watched her mixing the paints for a few minutes without comment. “Mademoiselle,” she finally began, her voice hesitant, “I could not help noticing you are very busy and seem to need an assistant.” 

Alexandrie stopped. “I do.” She resumed mixing. 

“If … you would not be too opposed to the idea, I would like to do the job.” 

Alexandrie stopped again. She stared at her in confusion. “Do you have any experience with art?” 

“No. But I can learn.” 

“I can’t afford to pay you what you would probably want.”

“I have government cheques, I don’t care about the money. You don’t need to pay me at all.” 

Alexandrie’s brow creased. “But why?” 

“Because… your work is important. And because I have the heart for it.” 

Alexandrie smiled faintly. “Let’s see if this color is a close enough match.” 

  
  
  


*****

  
  
  


“So? Are you pleased, Mademoiselle?” 

Alexandrie stood in the middle of her studio, in the middle of the night, with all of the lights burning. Astra stood beside her, fingers tangled in hers, wearing the mask that Alexandrie had made her. They were gazing at the sculpture that she had finally been able to complete because she had finally gotten an assistant. An assistant, as it happened, who was also the model. 

“Yes, Oberst, I’m very pleased.” They had never stopped addressing each other that way, three months later, although now it was more an endearment than a formality.

“I don’t understand why you wanted to show my scars.” 

Alexandrie smiled. “Because I found beauty in them. And the world should see it.” 

Astra squeezed her hand. 

The pose was the one that Alexandrie had been knocking her head against all those months ago. But the body was Astra’s. And more to the point, so was the face. Not the masked face, but the damaged face. It immortalized her scars. It celebrated the body she had placed into the line of fire. 

“What will you call her?” 

Alexandrie turned to her, softly tracing her fingers across Astra’s lips. “Sacrifice.” 

Astra leaned into her touch, closing her eyes. “You should be aware, Mademoiselle,” she whispered, “that I am in love with you.” 

Alexandrie tipped up on her toes and laid a kiss where her fingers had been. “Yes, I am aware, Oberst. That will not be a problem.”

She pulled back, and gently removed the mask from Astra’s face. And then she kissed her, everywhere, loving every scar as evidence of the good in her soul.

_ Let them try to tell me what is beautiful.  _


End file.
